If the numbers are accurate, the dynamics of mission must be shifting if we are to impact the largest unreached people group in the world. They tell us that 50% of the world population, that is one-half, is under the age of twenty-five. It means there's been a recent inversion that has sent the baby-boomers, my generation, to the the second spot on the generational cohort list. The millennials are now number one.
What is wrong with this picture? It should be very obvious. The traditional, main-line church is in a graying mode, that is, it is growing grayer with each passing year. Baptists are also losing ground in the commission to impact the nations, and this unique age-nation too. They say that only 10-13 per cent of the under twenty-five generation is even loosely attached to a church. It is a stagger- ing statistic reality that should be sounding alarms in the evangelical community.
Really, however, it isn't. Typically, church people will blame the youth and their crazy ways for the disconnect between the church and this age-group. So, with the world experiencing a seismic shift in 1990 with the World Wide Web, everything for the newer generations changed too. So, here is culture zooming along at the speed of thought while the church is hawking buggy whips and business as usual. Of a truth, many congregations are cultural throwbacks, reflecting not the new thing God is doing day by day int he here and now, but the things God was doing in the church back in the fifties, sixties, or seventies. As one observer said, if the nineteen sixties ever come back, the church will be ready. That is, the majority of churches.
So, we can load the blame for being different on the young people. Thank God they are. We can, how- ever take the majority of the heat for trying to keep this old wineskin going when it cannot hold the new wine of what God is doing today. A couple of months ago the leaders of an established and declining congregation told me they're rather die than change. That may be a prayer request that is answered because they are well on their way to it's fulfillment. With an average age of over 75, they are on the short list of extinction unless something changes.
This is a no-brainer for people who understand the truth of Scripture and the nature of the church. Change isn't the big no-no in the church because it is established in creation, a factor in every micro-fiber of this universe, the one constant is all things. Every thing changes. A church that will not contextualize it's mission in the current environment is pulling against the things God wired into His world. This kind of concept cannot survive.
What should be the order of the day is developing strategies for influencing and impacting the younger age cohorts. Shoot, for a boomer like me, these age-groups represent my grand-children. Certainly I want to be a church they are eager to attend and be a part of. It's puzzling to me there could be one single Baptist who wouldn't want to be that kind of church too.
We're to be aggressive in this too. It means going to the hightways and hedges, as the evangelists used to say in translating the word of Jesus, and compelling them to come in. They amy be our larget unreached people group, and we must reach out to them.
Even when I am old and gray, God, do not abandon me. Then I will proclaim Your power to ‹another› generation, Your strength to all who are to come.
Psalm 71:1
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